Final Exam Review Page

Exam Format

Exam Topics

1. Introductory UNIX concepts
• Differences between UNIX and other operating systems
• Logins and passwords
• Commanding the system via the shell
• Shell commands, arguments, and options (syntax)
• Logging out
• UNIX filesystem
• hierarchical structure
• types of files
• relationship to physical storage devices
• working directory
• home directory
• absolute vs. relative paths
• "." and ".."
• file permissions
• file owner and group
• symbolic links
• wildcards in filenames
2. Basic shell commands and operation
• Filesystem commands: cd, ls, rm, cp, mv, rmdir, mkdir, touch, chmod, ln, pwd
• Viewing file contents: cat, more
• Help commands: man, apropos
• Process commands: ps, top, kill, time
• Text editing with vi
• command vs. insert modes
• why UNIX files are usually plain ASCII text
• basic vi commands and modes
3. UNIX shells
• concept of shell commands as a language
• different UNIX shell programs
• environment variables: displaying, setting, and using them
• aliases in ksh
• ksh login scripts: .shrc and .profile
• stdin, stdout, stderr: defaults and redirection
• pipes and filters
• executing shell scripts
• variables in shell scripts: numeric, string, array
• referring to command line arguments in shell scripts
• concept of quoting in shell variables
• conditional, looping, and case constructs in shell scripts
4. Regular expressions
• definition and importance
• characters vs. metacharacters
• concept of quoting in regular expressions
• basic use of egrep
• basic metacharacters in egrep: . (period), *, ^, $, \, [], +, ?, |, (), {}
• interpreting regular expressions (i.e. what does this RE match?)
• constructing regular expressions (i.e. what's an RE that matches this set of strings?)
5. UNIX development tools
• basic steps in program development
• GNU C compiler (gcc)
• what it's used for
• types of files: source, headers, object files, executables
• key options: -c, -g, -o, -l, -L, -I
• make
• what it's used for and why it's important for large software projects
• concept of "chain of dependencies"
• types of lines in makefiles: rules, commands, macro assignments, comments
• suffix rules
• RCS
• definition and importance of revision control
• basic features of RCS: logging, numbering, locking, merging
• basic RCS commands: rcs, ci, co
• process of revision control with multiple programmers
• Debugging with gdb
• what it's used for and why it's important
• high-level features of debuggers: breakpoints, stepping through code, show/change variables
• execution commands: run, next, step
• breakpoint commands: break, delete, condition, continue
• information commands: list, print, display, where
6. UNIX system programming
• definition of system call
• file descriptors
• raw file I/O calls (concepts, not details of arguments): open(), close(), read(), write(), lseek()
• fopen(), fclose(), fread(), fwrite(), fseek()
• structured datatypes in file I/O (e.g. fprintf(), fscanf())
• process vs. program
• process system calls: fork(), exec*(), and wait()
• sending signals
• IPC: message passing vs. shared memory
• IPC with pipes
7. UNIX window systems
• usability motivation for window systems
• what X windows does
• running X programs remotely using the client-server architecture
• other features of X
• window systems (e.g. X) vs. window managers vs. desktop environments
8. System adminstration and security
• definition of system administration
• superuser (root)
• concept of adminstration through files
• basic contents of files in /etc: passwd, group, inetd.conf, fstab, inittab
• installing Linux with security in mind
• rules for secure passwords
• disabling nework services for security
• why ssh is preferable to telnet/rsh/rcp
• packet filtering rule: implicitly deny, explicitly allow

Study Materials

1. Lecture notes, available on the schedule page
2. Your own notes from lectures
3. Quizzes given this semester, available on the quizzes page
4. Scripting and programming examples, accessible from links on the schedule page and within lab assignments
5. Assigned chapters of "Learning the UNIX Operating System"
6. Labs, especially the "assessment" portions (e.g. WhizQuiz quizzes or results of labs), and solutions to labs, available on the main labs page
7. Programming assignments/solutions
8. Assigned readings from "UNIX in a Nutshell"
9. Quizzes from past semesters, available on the quizzes page

Study Tips

• Questions from this semester's quizzes give you a good idea of the style and content of questions likely to be asked on the final
• The lecture notes, by their very nature, cannot contain all the detail you need about a particular topic. Correlate the lecture notes with your personal notes that you took in lecture and with information in the book or in man pages. Use the lecture notes as pointers to information that the instructor thinks is important.
• The more places you find a particular piece of information, the more likely it is to be on the exam. Something that is highlighted in the lecture notes, readings, and in a quiz is more important than something that was a small result in a lab session.
• When studying information about specific commands/function calls/etc., it may be useful to go back and try them interactively to refresh your memory. Remember, the best way to learn UNIX is by doing, not by reading or listening.
• When studying information from lab sessions, write down a few key concepts that you learned in each lab, especially if you learned additional information beyond the lecture for that week.
• Exam questions will be focused more on concepts than on detailed facts. That is, the exam will be designed to test your understanding of the UNIX operating system, not your detailed knowledge of every command, scripting construct, and configuration file. Therefore, do not spend the major part of your study time memorizing arguments to shell commands or the syntax of shell scripting. Instead, you should be able to look at a shell script or system program and understand what it does. You should understand the concepts behind a hierarchical file system. And so on. Of course, there are certain facts that must be memorized - for example, "What shell command is used to perform such and such a task?", or "What is the directory at the top of the UNIX filesystem tree?"